Christianity

[Harry Baird]

there isn't really any doubt that all life on Earth evolved from something very simple.

To address this more specifically: there very much is a great deal of doubt; even disproof, considering that if this were true, then there would be an unambiguous "tree of life" according to which every species descends along a definitive "branch" of the tree.

This hypothetical tree of life, though, is very much ambiguous and even impossible to construct.

[Immanuel Can]

Now, who disagrees with you? How about Jurgen Habermas (author of "The Legitimation Crisis")? What about Hans Blumenberg (author of "The Legitimation of the Modern Age")? And in specific, with regard to the difficulties of legitimating "justice" as a concept, what about Rawls, Dworking, Sen or Wolterstorff, each of whom wrote at least one volume trying to deal with the question you say is "a figment of your imagination"?

Can you cite where any of these theologians and philosophers speak about *eternal Hells*? and defend the notion of eternal punishment for those who do not, cannot, of don't *believe*?

It's not necessary. Specific examples of any alleged "injustice" will remain utterly incoherent unless there is some objective substance to the concept, "justice." It's like saying, "Your God is too XXXX." There's no accusation, because there's no substance.

So you say that eternal punishment is unwarranted. On whose grounded conception of "justice"? How do you know what deserves eternal consequences, and what does not? When a criminal commits an offense that takes him a few minutes, like theft of rape, we don't say, "Well, we can only lock him up for 3.5 minutes, because that's how long it took him to commit sexual assault."

So on what theory would you advance the proposition that God has no right to determine the consequences appropriate to sin? How would you show Him wrong? And since Harry doesn't believe that God exists anyway (which is his whole point), who is he accusing?

So he's got no theory of justice, nobody who promised him whatever conception of "justice" he's carrying around in his noggin and won't share, and nobody to accuse.

So what's the question?

[Harbal]

there isn't really any doubt that all life on Earth evolved from something very simple.

To address this more specifically: there very much is a great deal of doubt; even disproof, considering that if this were true, then there would be an unambiguous "tree of life" according to which every species descends along a definitive "branch" of the tree.

This hypothetical tree of life, though, is very much ambiguous and even impossible to construct.

I feel sure that if mainstream scientific thought on evolution by natural selection had substantially altered I would have heard something about it. It would be quite big news, I think.

[Harry Baird]

So you say that eternal punishment is unwarranted. On whose grounded conception of "justice"?

Anybody's except for that of an insane fundamentalist who is forced to such a contrary, and perversely reversed, conception because he refuses to examine his core - and easily falsifiable - premise that the Bible is literally the Word of God, and therefore that whatever it says must be true, no matter how contorted or absurd.

How do you know what deserves eternal consequences, and what does not?

By basic common sense, you idiot.

How do you? "'Cos da Bible sed so"?

Harry doesn't believe that God exists anyway

I've told you explicitly that I'm a theist. Thus...

(which is his whole point)

...this can't be remotely true. Try reading for comprehension.

[Harry Baird]

I feel sure that if mainstream scientific thought on evolution by natural selection had substantially altered I would have heard something about it. It would be quite big news, I think.

Paradigm shifts take time. It has been said that (paraphrased, I'm not sure how well) scientific paradigms change not because the old guard changes its mind, but because it dies out and makes room for the new idea to take hold.

[seeds]

Seeds quoted Meister Eckhardt:

“The seed of God is in us: Pear seeds grow into pear trees; Hazel seeds into hazel trees; And God seeds into God.”

This is a restatement of Aristotle's idea of forms, which was that each species has a form of perfection that individuals strive to meet. We must respect Aristotle's experience and acute observations as a hands-on marine biologist.
However Darwin knocked Aristotelian forms theory into the long grass.

No, B.

Stop trying to sidetrack and obscure the point I was making.

As I stated in the sentence that immediately followed the Eckhart quote:

The point being that like any and all self-propagating life forms, God has his own unique "seed" of himself (herself/itself), and we humans are it.

While it's true that tree colonies, ants, frogs, sewer rats, dogs, dolphins, chimpanzees, etc., etc., have their place (rung) on the ascending ladder of consciousness depicted in one of my fanciful illustrations...



...they are not the seeds of God.

And as I tried to make clear in my prior post to you, in order for a corporeal entity in this universe to make it to "Ultimate Seed" ("God-Seed") status, a certain (threshold-crossing) level of consciousness must be reached...



And what I furthermore tried to make clear (or suggest) is that the Eden Myth is an allegorical representation of the moment (way back in the distant past) when ancient hominids were prompted...

(either by ingesting entheogenic plants, or via divine intervention)

...into crossing the abovementioned threshold of (introspective/mental holography controlling) consciousness, and thus became the Biblically denoted "...one of us..." family members of, again, the highest species of being in all of reality.
_______

[Harbal]

Paradigm shifts take time.

Well, personally, I wouldn't put money on a paradigm shift occurring in this instance. I'm saying that without knowing anything about the alternative view that you say you have, of course, so I don't suppose I ought to close my mind completely. Even so, I very much suspect that I have.

[Harry Baird]

Paradigm shifts take time.

Well, personally, I wouldn't put money on a paradigm shift occurring in this instance.

You could be right, and here's why: there is a great ideological investment in the current paradigm. If life originates in blind, unintelligent processes, then it needs no designer to explain it, and, phew, that means that the existence of life has no implication for the existence of a God, and, phew, that then means that it doesn't support religion, and, well, ain't that great, 'cos religion has screwed the human race over for centuries, and we're just beginning to free ourselves of its iron grip. Evolution for the win!

See what I'm saying?

I'm saying that without knowing anything about the alternative view that you say you have, of course, so I don't suppose I ought to close my mind completely. Even so, I very much suspect that I have.

As I wrote earlier, I'm happy to share some of the materials that have convinced me. I get the sense you're not interested though, which is fine - but you did challenge me on this in the first place.

[Alexis Jacobi]

It's not necessary. Specific examples of any alleged "injustice" will remain utterly incoherent unless there is some objective substance to the concept, "justice." It's like saying, "Your God is too XXXX." There's no accusation, because there's no substance.

So you say that eternal punishment is unwarranted. On whose grounded conception of "justice"? How do you know what deserves eternal consequences, and what does not? When a criminal commits an offense that takes him a few minutes, like theft of rape, we don't say, "Well, we can only lock him up for 3.5 minutes, because that's how long it took him to commit sexual assault."

So on what theory would you advance the proposition that God has no right to determine the consequences appropriate to sin? How would you show Him wrong? And since Harry doesn't believe that God exists anyway (which is his whole point), who is he accusing?

So he's got no theory of justice, nobody who promised him whatever conception of "justice" he's carrying around in his noggin and won't share, and nobody to accuse.

I start from the necessary assertion that any notion you have, or we have, of afterlife, is an *imagined idea* that exists, if you will, in an imagined space. As you well know I regard Scripture not as words and phrases that *God* intoned and were recorded by hearers and scribes, but as formulations cobbled together by a priestly class. This does not mean, at least in my way of understanding, that all such *quotations* are void of sound content. But the entire edifice of revelation (i.e. the voice of God that is presented in the form of quotations in scripture) can be examined in various ways.

I pointed out: 1) that one method is a rational study of Judea and the physical man Jesus outside of the divinization of that man, 2) the examination and consideration of the Christian Construct and the transformation, the embellishment of the figure of Jesus into a Divine Incarnation (avatar of god); and then 3) the Jesus of a person's inner faith and 3a) that of group faith and shared worship.

You are, as is evident to all, locked within the Jesus of faith category.

The god you talk about, and which you refer to, is an abstraction that you have reified into a concrete thing or being. When you refer to god or what god does or will do you are referring to imagined outcomes. Who handles these *imagined outcomes* in the theological world? Well priests and preachers of course. And their use of the notion of *eternal hell*, and indeed punishments that extend beyond the temporal, known world, these have an apologetic function. However, they do not describe 'reality'.

We can talk therefore about 'human justice' and notions of justice within our temporal world. But we really cannot talk with much degree of certainty, and some would say with any level of certainty, about what comes after we have died.

Eternal punishment, or unending torture and torment, therefore, is a concept that I can only approach through my temporal being. So for someone who has committed great crimes the punishment is annihilation: death. For lesser crimes there are various levels of punishment. But the notion of an intolerable torture and torment for any criminal is an idea that no one of us will allow. And therefore no one of us, if it were possible, would assign eternal torturous punishment if we were in our right mind. Best to annihilate the criminal and be done with it.

However, and with that said, if we are to engage in speculation and if we are to refer to existent speculative models, I would say that if a soul exists, will survive physical death, and carry on in some other plane, that certainly facing the consequences of what one had done (being punished, living our punishment) definitely makes sense. But the punishment would, in my concept, have a moral function: to bring about the moral conversion of that soul. So very simply I can create a picture and present it to you: a man who rapes should have to live out the consequences of experiencing rape. If that person, that man, did not previously understand the consequence of a thoughtless action, he would be forced (by the Ultimate Authority) to learn the error of his ways. In that there is both mercy and justice. (Or justice in combination with mercy).

So on what theory would you advance the proposition that God has no right to determine the consequences appropriate to sin? How would you show Him wrong? And since Harry doesn't believe that God exists anyway (which is his whole point), who is he accusing?

Neither Harry nor myself are atheists, just for the record. However you would define us as atheists because we seem to disbelieve what you believe, which is to say the belief that you have come to believe is necessary and needed. In other words the sort of *belief* that you have defined as being Christian and Biblical.

You cannot say, if you desired to be fair and honest, that Harry has no concept of justice. In truth it is you who has no concept of justice! I mean as a genuine intellectual possession. You only repeat what Scripture defines as justice and you cannot, in any way, at any time, for any reason, deviate from this. Thus you are not really a moral person or a mature moral agent.

Trippy, eh? given your Protestant orientation . . .

[Harbal]

As I wrote earlier, I'm happy to share some of the materials that have convinced me. I get the sense you're not interested though, which is fine - but you did challenge me on this in the first place.

I wasn't quite sure what you were getting at. You might have been suggesting that there was an element of a kind of intelligent, or purposeful, guidance involved in the process of biological evolution, which would have been interesting. That is why I tried to probe into what you might be hinting at; it wasn't really a challenge. Now that you've brought God into the conversation I'm afraid my interest has evaporated. But thanks for your indulgence.

[Belinda]

As far as I'm aware, although I admit that I'm not aware of much, there isn't really any doubt that all life on Earth evolved from something very simple. Does that fit in with your favoured version of events?

Not so much, no, but it really depends on what you mean by "evolved". I don't think species originated via (Neo)Darwinian evolution, but, potentially, *designs* were evolved as time went on by the intelligence(s) which created them.

What is a "non-physical intelligence" ? ' Non-physical' is sort of intelligible, but 'intelligence' has several meanings. Sometimes it means information, sometimes it means cleverness, sometimes it means good at passing IQ tests. I suspect that Harry when he says intelligence he means purpose but he is trying to sound mysterious. Harry is probably a believer in God as pancreator Who acted at a point in time.

[Immanuel Can]

So you say that eternal punishment is unwarranted. On whose grounded conception of "justice"?

Anybody's...

Got an answer for the legitimation problem yet, Harry?

No?

Didn't think so.

[Belinda]

Seeds quoted Meister Eckhardt:

“The seed of God is in us: Pear seeds grow into pear trees; Hazel seeds into hazel trees; And God seeds into God.”

This is a restatement of Aristotle's idea of forms, which was that each species has a form of perfection that individuals strive to meet. We must respect Aristotle's experience and acute observations as a hands-on marine biologist.
However Darwin knocked Aristotelian forms theory into the long grass.

No, B.

Stop trying to sidetrack and obscure the point I was making.

As I stated in the sentence that immediately followed the Eckhart quote:

The point being that like any and all self-propagating life forms, God has his own unique "seed" of himself (herself/itself), and we humans are it.

While it's true that tree colonies, ants, frogs, sewer rats, dogs, dolphins, chimpanzees, etc., etc., have their place (rung) on the ascending ladder of consciousness depicted in one of my fanciful illustrations...



...they are not the seeds of God.

And as I tried to make clear in my prior post to you, in order for a corporeal entity in this universe to make it to "Ultimate Seed" ("God-Seed") status, a certain (threshold-crossing) level of consciousness must be reached...



And what I furthermore tried to make clear (or suggest) is that the Eden Myth is an allegorical representation of the moment (way back in the distant past) when ancient hominids were prompted...

(either by ingesting entheogenic plants, or via divine intervention)

...into crossing the abovementioned threshold of (introspective/mental holography controlling) consciousness, and thus became the Biblically denoted "...one of us..." family members of, again, the highest species of being in all of reality.
_______

Your diagrams are ugly, boringly obscure ,and I long since stopped even looking at them. Meister Eckhardt is much more interesting which is why I even bothered to reply to you. I never reply to rude people .

[Nick_A]

the legitimation problem

...is a figment of your imagination.

Let's see if you're right.

Now, who disagrees with you? How about Jurgen Habermas (author of "The Legitimation Crisis")? What about Hans Blumenberg (author of "The Legitimation of the Modern Age")? And in specific, with regard to the difficulties of legitimating "justice" as a concept, what about Rawls, Dworking, Sen or Wolterstorff, each of whom wrote at least one volume trying to deal with the question you say is "a figment of your imagination"?

What about the vexations of "social justice" versus "personal justice" as we see these things played out every day in our newspapers? Do you think the issues are easy and straightforward? Do you suppose you can say to both sides, "Just read my dictionary's definition, and all your problems will be solved"? Or is it possible that, just maybe, you're unaware of a serious problem because nobody's ever called you to step up to it before?

In point of fact, you'll find that any philosopher worth his salt knows that legitimation is a very serious problem, especially because of the refusal to entertain God as a part of that legitimation; and that among our current difficulties, legitimation of a concept of justice is one of the hardest of all.

To say when "justice" is being done seems to depend entirely on the worldview one holds. The concept is no more stable than that. And until we discover which worldview, if any, is the real one, "justice" is going to remain as vague, wobbly and evasive as it's always been.

So, Harry, you need an account of what "justice" is, before you can accuse anyone...or any God...of falling short of that conception. And you need some evidence that the human race was promised to be given that specific attainment of "justice" in the first place, or nothing can be said to be unfair. You can't appeal to Charles Darwin or Herbert Spencer or Friedrich Nietzsche or Ayn Rand to promise you "justice."

Is that a bar you can clear? Or are you determined simply to continue in unawareness that the leap exists at all?

It should be obvious why deniers cannot define justice. Deniers explain the source of values by what the senses interpret. anyone who accepts the source of creation as beyond what the senses experience knows that justice is not a conditioned external reaction but internal knowledge always known we experience as conscience. Conscience is an expression of justice.

But to contemplate justice necessitates pondering the dreaded G word, the ground, the deniers must oppose

[Immanuel Can]

...the notion of an intolerable torture and torment for any criminal...

That may be because many people's conception of "sin" is limited to actions. It never occurs to them that the reprehensible actions are symptoms, not the disease itself. The actions come from a creature who's choices, disposition, attitudes AND actions are all virulently opposed to God.

Sin doesn't do itself. It has to come from somewhere. Or more correctly, it has to come from somebody...some entity capable of conceiving and producing that action.

"The good person out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good; and the evil person out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart." (Luke 6:45)

"But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and those things defile the person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, acts of adultery, other immoral sexual acts, thefts, false testimonies, and slanderous statements. These are the things that defile the person..." (Matt. 15:18-20)

It's not what we do that is the chief problem of justice; it's what we are. Somebody invented that sin, somebody sponsored that action, and a certain kind of heart spawned that evil. If we regard only the action, we forget that the action had a wellspring that is always ready to create more.

And it is this feature that Christ Himself emphasized...that the "sin" is performed by one who is, by nature, a "sinner": meaning, one in a relationship of hatred and antipathy to God. He neither wants God, nor acknowledges God's justice. Instead, he "turns himself to his own way," as Isaiah puts it. He rejects God, and all that God is and brings, and embraces the darkness instead. There's something profoudly bent, profoundly wrong with the very constitution of such a being. And that's man, in his sinful state...not just a committer of sin, but a creator and lover of it, devoted to his own destruction.

This is why Jesus said, "You must be born again." (John 3) A person needs a transformation not merely of externals, but of the internals as well; and of that nature that threatens to constitute one as a permanent enemy of God, of righteousness and of justice.

But this we also have from Scripture: that souls last forever. That's the nature of what a soul is. There is no eliminating that fact; and that fact should make is all the more serious about the disposition of our souls.

Again, Christ asked, "For what good will it do a person if he gains the whole world, but forfeits his soul? Or what will a person give in exchange for his soul?" (Matt. 16:26)

All the more reason to think carefully.

Neither Harry nor myself are atheists, just for the record.

What god do you believe in, then?

You cannot say, if you desired to be fair and honest, that Harry has no concept of justice.

Well, I can certainly say he has no "grounded" conception, no "warranted" conception, no "defensible" conception, and perhaps no "coherent" conception, for all we can tell. He can't seem to tell us what it is, for sure.

What I think he has, at most, is an "intuitive feel" that there ought to be something LIKE "justice," a concept he seems quite powerless to legitimize in any rational terms. So for him, it might well be no more than an "intuition." It might lack any corresponding reality at all. We could never tell otherwise, given what he hasn't given us.